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Sharp Zaurus

Description

A Sharp Zaurus is a PDA that runs linux straight from the factory. Because of this, there is a large development community behind it. This is a great PDA, although many of the models are marketed strictly in Japan, and as such, can be hard to purchase in many other parts of the world. If you are looking for one, I highly recommend eBay.

Supported Models

Currently, the only model officially supported is Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 with a CF prism2 card using hostap drivers.

That being said, here is why. I only own a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, and I only have a Linksys WCF12. The binary for Aircrack-ng *should* work on any ARM based system at all, the hostap-utils package should also work. Both of these binaries are not really dependent on much, and hence, a wide range of support is possible. The real key problem, is the drivers, and I will explain that in the next section.

Since right now, I only claim official support for Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 with a prism2 card using hostap drivers, let me say this. If you have a device, pda, embedded device of some kind, that runs linux, and has a wifi card, that you would like to run aircrack on, PLEASE, talk to me! I am anxious to extend the full Aircrack-ng Suite to new platforms. Donations of hardware, are always appreciated, but all that is required is a donation of your time to help me with information about the device, and testing. But let me repeat, donations of hardware are always appreciated

I have used aircrack-ng on a Sharp Zaurus SL-6000L. The SL-6000L has a built-in prism2_usb card which requires use of the wlan-ng drivers. I believe sniffing worked with the wlan-ng from CVS (actually, it may have worked with the drivers included in OpenZaurus). I applied one of the wlan-ng injection patches floating around; I think that allowed me to inject a few packets but then crashed the device relatively quickly.

The SL-6000L also has USB host capabilities, so by attaching a Linksys WUSB54G (use a powered hub, or get more power to it some other way, because the Zaurus supposedly doesn't supply enough) and compiling rt2570 CVS for ARM (the OpenEmbedded build system, bitbake and friends, really isn't that bad) I was able to do sniffing and apparently injection (I never got a working injection test but I think that was due to signal issues) with that NIC. I used aircrack-ng 0.7 which I built myself for OpenZaurus. Kernel was 2.6.17 from a recent OpenZaurus release. If someone's really jonesing for the rt2570 ipkgs, I may be able to put them up somewhere, especially if someone else wants to distribute them and doesn't mind me uploading with Tor. Better might be just to publish the (relatively small) bitbake files to build these packages.

Supported Drivers

Currently, the only supported drivers built for embedded systems are hostap for kernel 2.4.18-embeddix. This is the kernel and driver set that my Zaurus uses. If you tell me the device, the driver and the kernel, I will *try* to add support. If you spend some time with me helping me learn about your device, and testing my work, you will find a higher chance of success than a message saying “Please support my XXXXX”.

Drivers

A note on prism2

When I received my Linksys WCF12 in the mail, I had a LOAD of problems with it. To be honest, I thought it was a piece of junk. Then, a nice guy asked me what firmware I was running, and lo and behold, I was running *ancient* firmware. After upgrading my firmware (I use 1.8.4), the card works like a charm. I highly recommend running at least 1.7.4, but my card works just swell with 1.8.4.

Flashing your prism2 card

You will find in the downloads section, hostap-utils built for ARM, as well as drivers that support injection. Install both the hostap-drivers and hostap-utils, you need both hostap and hostap_cs. Once you have installed my packages for hostap-utils and hostap-drivers, proceed to flashing your card in Prism2 flashing.

This will be the end of my information for now, I'm sure I'll be flooded with requests for support and more information, and this page will grow and mature, but for now, have fun kids, and don't get into trouble